criminal Justice
Spyworm
Psychosocialtheories.ppsPsychosocial theories - assumptions
- Individuals are the units of analysis (study)
- Theorists are searching for personalities or personality traits that distinguish between criminals and non-criminals
- Assumes that personality is the major motivational element
- Crime results from abnormal, dysfunctional, or inappropriate processes within the personality
- Defective personality can result from a variety of causes (biological, genetic, social)
- Criminal behavior serves a purpose for the individual committing the crime (relieves aggression, is physiologically reinforcing)
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What we’ll look at today
- Psychopathic personalities
- The criminal mind
- Psychoanalytic approaches (mental illness)
- IQ and crime connection
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Issues to think about
- If crime is explained by biological and/or psychological forces that are beyond one’s control. . . .can we then hold a person fully responsible for their behavior?
- Can we force treatment (execution competency)
- Can we reliably identify individuals who are likely to commit crime based on their personalities? What if we make a mistake?
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Psychopathic personality (Anti-social personality)
- Harvey Cleckley (1941) – The Mask of Sanity
- Hare “The Sociopaths Among Us”
- Sociopaths or psychopaths are characterized by:
- Superficial charm and intelligence
- Absence of delusions, hallucinations, or other signs of psychosis
- Absence of nervousness
- Unable to feel guilt or shame
- Unreliable, chronic lying
- Ongoing antisocial behavior (conduct disorder)
- Inability to learn from experience
- Narcissistic, unable to love
- Failure to follow a life plan
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Interesting findings
- Prevalence: 6x more common in boys than girls; 6-16% in boys and 2-9% in girls – may be higher in samples of prisoners and substance users
- Hare estimates 15% - 20% of prisoners are psychopaths compared to 3-5% in general population
- Most agree there is a biological component: Impairment in prefrontal cortex, amygdala, no physical reaction to emotional things; genetic connection?
- We DO NOT know how to treat someone with sociopathy
- Early predictors (markers) (Macdonald triad – Triad of sociopathy)
- Bed wetting
- Firesetting
- Cruelty to animals (practice at victim selection)
- Not in all sociopaths!
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The Criminal Mind
- Do you think criminals think differently than non-criminals (you and I)?
- How so?
- Can we identify them ahead of time based on these different thinking patterns?
- How do we change defective thought processes?
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The Criminal Mind
- Yochelson and Samenow (1976, 1977)
- “Thought patterns” that describe all criminals (based on interviews with offenders) and 52 “errors of criminal thinking”
- Chronic lying
- Other people’s property is their own
- Unrelenting optimism
- Great energy
- Fear of injury
- Intense anger
- Manipulativeness
- A high self-image
- Treating this “personality” type? (approach used today in corrections)
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Psychoanalytic criminology
- Developed from Freud’s work (ego, superego, and id)
- Do criminals have higher levels of mental disorders of these types than non-criminals?
- Are people with mental disorders more likely to commit crime than people without them?
- Does mental illness CAUSE crime?
- Neuroses – behavioral disorders characterized by anxiety and fears or by overpowering drives to perform irrational activities (examples?)
- Psychoses – Two forms marked by grossly distorted conception of reality (hallucinations)
- Affective disorders (depression, bipolar )
- Schizophrenia
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IQ – Crime connection
- Delinquents usually have lower verbal intelligence (intellectual imbalance) (PIQ > VIQ)
- Does this mean that low IQ in and of itself causes crime? What might be some other explanations?
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Contributions from these approaches?
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How would you criticize this approach?
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Contributions
- Early ID becomes possible (threat assessment)
- Focus is now on rehabilitation (if it is possible)
- Psychological profiling techniques – assumes that behavior is symptomatic of underlying personality (bleaching a crime scene, taking away a “trophy”, staging a body, covering a body with a tarp, bringing a weapon to the scene)
- Doesn’t always work (Sniper case)
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Criticisms
- Hard to empirically measure and test
- Comparison group?
- Tautological and circular in nature (using criminality to discover the defective personality and then using the personality to explain the criminality)
- Scope? Can this approach explain all crime?
- Key problem – many offenders do not have underlying psychological disorders – although media makes us think otherwise (although substance abuse may alter one’s personality) – folks with mental illness may be more prone to be crime victims NOT offenders
- Many offenders do not have antisocial personalities
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Criticisms (continued)
- Does not take into account the important role of social, economic and political processes in the production of criminal behavior
- Fails to explain how a criminal career develops, peaks, and then wanes over time (desistance)
- Fails to explain geographic differences in crimes rates (between countries and regions)
- Fails to explain crime trends (waves over time)
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Crime Control Measures/Policies
- Rehabilitation instead of punishment
- Treat the underlying condition with meds
- Can we “force medication”? Right to say NO?
- Competency to be executed
- Prediction and risk assessment (early intervention) – problems?
- Incapacitate only those for whom treatment doesn’t work
- Use of insanity defense and other diminished capacity techniques (guilty but not mentally ill standard)
- McNaughten rule (did not know the nature of the act and that it was wrong)
- Brawner rule (mental disease or defect results in inability to appreciate criminality of conduct or to conform conduct to the requirements of the law)
- Today defendant typically must prove
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Outstanding issues
- Is free will a myth?
- Treatment not effective? How do we treat sociopaths? Malingerers?
- Is mental illness an “aggravating” factor or “mitigating” factor? (CJP research)
- Do offenders have a right to treatment just as they have a right to punishment?
- Can we force psychiatric treatment on offenders? Liberty vs. individual interests
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